Guide Aims To Help Teachers Integrate Technology

Teachers who have been struggling with how to make fuller use of
technology in their day-to-day lessons now have access to a guide full
of practical advice.

Follow-Up

"National
Educational Technology Standards for Students: Connecting
Curriculum and Technology" can be ordered by calling (800)
336-5191. A modified version can be found online at www.iste.org.

The 373-page publication, "National Educational
Technology Standards for Students: Connecting Curriculum and
Technology," was released last week at a press conference here by the
Eugene, Ore.-based International Society for Technology in
Education.

ISTE published standards for what students should know about
technology and be able to do with it in June 1998 as part of the
group's National Educational Technology Standards, or NETS, project.
This second publication is meant to show teachers how the standards can
be linked to their regular lessons.

"We knew that putting the standards out there was not enough,"
Lajeanne Thomas, the NETS project director, said at the press
conference. "This will be an important resource for teachers to use in
integrating technology with the content standards they have to
meet."

The U.S. Department of Education is paying for every school district
and state education department in the country to receive a free copy of
the guide.

Specific Advice

The guide consists of dozens of lesson plans written by teachers
from all over the country. Each lesson contains references to which
specific technology and content standards it covers and a list of
relevant software or World Wide Web sites.

One such lesson, "Earth Movement in Real Time," is designed to teach
middle school students how scientists monitor geological activities.
The guide advises teachers to assign students to groups of five to
seven members, with each group responsible for a different geographical
area.

Among other activities, students check a Web site that tracks
earthquakes and then graph the data over a period of several weeks.

While ISTE clearly advocates a "constructivist" philosophy of
education—in which students rather than teachers direct their own
learning—the guide is designed to appeal to traditional as well
as nontraditional teachers.

"Not every activity is at the bleeding edge," Ms. Thomas said. "You
don't leave traditional learning environments immediately. A transition
time is necessary."

Cheryl L. Lemke, the vice president for education technology for the
Milken Family Foundation, one of the funders of the guide, predicted
that the book would open up teachers' eyes to some of the ways that
technology could transform their classes. "Teachers don't know what
they don't know," she said.

But having schools make good use of technology on a wide scale takes
more than simply creating awareness among individual teachers, said
Margaret Honey, the director of the Center for Children and Technology
in New York City, who was not involved in writing the guide.

"Unless there's a concerted effort at the district level or building
level so technology is used to support the local community's
objectives, the use of technology will remain occasional," she
said.

As its next step, ISTE will begin writing standards for what
teachers should know about and be able to do with technology.

"Internet
Access in Public School Classrooms, 1994-98," U.S. Department of
Education, 1999. Provides information by characteristics of schools
with Internet access for the school and for the classrooms. Reports on
ratios of students per instructional computer and students per
instructional computer with Internet access.

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